The Soundtrack of Our LivesA Double Album in Prose​by Annie Christie

Genre:DramaSwearwords: None.Description:For anyone who has ever got lost in music!

​Disc OneSide Two

Mis-Spent Youths

Holdin' on to sixteen as long as you canChange is coming 'round real soonMake us woman and man (John Cougar)

​Track TenWhy not think about times to come,And not about the things that you’ve done (Fleetwood Mac)~ When I Need You, 1977 ~​

January 1977. Two years on from the lame song by Pilot of the same name. ‘You make me sad with your eyes, you’re telling me lies, don’t go, don’t go.’ How times had changed. We’d long since had our Seasons in the Sun. At the time I thought it as real, but I looked it up recently on Google and discovered that Terry Jacks himself is still alive and well, and he wrote it for the Beach Boys who didn’t use it. So the lyrics that haunted me for years: ‘Goodbye to you my trusted friend, We've known each other since we were nine or ten, Together we've climbed hills and trees, Learned of love and ABC's, Skinned our hearts and skinned our knees’ had no special meaning to him. But later, much later, they came to have a special meaning to me.

One way or another, by 1977 we’d all grown up a lot. It was Rachel’s seventeenth birthday on 13th Feb. Billy bought Rachel a chart single for her birthday. It was to become a tradition with them. She stopped. He never did.

He started with Leo Sayer, When I need you. However much it said what he felt, it must have killed him to go into the shop and buy that. The record shop was, how shall we say, intimate in size and even bravely stating ‘it’s for my girlfriend’ wasn’t doing anything for his street cred. And music shops were important those days. But he didn’t dare buy Don’t Cry for me Argentina which was number one because of the connotations in the fall out of Scooby and Laura. Leo Sayer was number three. Number two was David Soul Don’t Give up on us. Personally I’d have picked that one but that’s because I construed it as being ‘our’ song. I guess he was worried Rachel might see it that way too.

Come to think of it, I’m amazed he ever came up with the idea, given that the charts were so unashamedly schmaltzy at that time. But with the bravado of a boy not yet turned sixteen, he’d promised her something special, and with the financial resources of a boy not yet turned sixteen he was limited, so he cut his losses and went with Leo Sayer. She loved it. She loved the idea of it and she loved the sentiment of it.

It didn’t take long for the wheels to come off the record romance, though. April 30th was the eighteen month anniversary of Billy and Rachel going out. It was a Saturday. They celebrated by going out for a meal at the Italian café. It was to be a real, Saturday evening ‘date’ night. But things didn’t go exactly to plan. They had got this kind of way of talking to each other through song lyrics – a dangerous game to play you might think – as it meant they were at least partly at the mercy of the charts and the other part at the mercy of their own interpretations.

Here’s what happened. He put on Berni Flint’s First Love, Best Love.‘Seventeen and like a queen and every day was good.’ He was trying so hard to be romantic. Those were the days, eh? She played Knowing Me, Knowing You by Abba. He thought she was laughing at him. He struck back with more Berni Flint, this time – I don’t want to put no hold on you. She, trying to lighten the mood, played When by Showaddywaddy, and in response he played How much love? by Leo Sayer to which she replied with Fleetwood Mac Don’t Stop. That stopped him in his tracks. Game over. They kissed and made up. But, like all teenage boys he was deeply insecure.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, here is their conversation:

Billy: Seventeen and like a queen and every day was good.

Rachel: Memories, good days, bad days, They'll be with me always.

But Billy hears: We just have to face it, this time we’re through.

Billy: Such a lovely feelin', darling, having you so near, gee, it's good to know that you're around.

Rachel hears: Should you ever go away then let me make it clear, I won't ever try to tie you down.

Rachel replies: I need you, I want you near me, I love you, Yes I do and I hope you hear me.

Risking that he’s going to hear: When, (when), when you kiss, when you kiss me right I, I don't want to ever say goodnight Billy replies: Am I tryin' too hard, Give me some kind of clue, There must be a way to get through to you, Should I come on strong or do I hesitate, Do I rush right in or do I wait?

But Rachel hears: The last thing I want, is to drive you away, How much love, does it take, How much love for heaven sake?

You can see that this is a dangerous kind of communication. The possibilities for misinterpretation are many and varied.

Rachel puts a stop to it with Fleetwood Mac: Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow…

And in case he wasn’t getting her drift, she kissed him.

This was the special language invented by Billy and Rachel, and we thought they were so cool. However much we were lost in music, none of us had the skill or bravery to express ourselves this way. We, you’ll remember, were capable of no more than using lyrics as gybes. This was the sort of thing that passed as foreplay among teens in the 1970s. At least at our school.

But you probably want to know how I know that all happened between Billy and Rachel? I wasn’t there, after all. Well, Rachel told me. At the end of April she was trying to get me to make up a mixed tape for her from the radio chart shows for Billy’s Birthday. But she was out all the time (with Billy, of course) so she didn’t have the time or dedication to sit waiting to press record when the appropriate song came on the radio. So she gave me her desired ‘playlist’. I did my best, but I kind of mucked it up and didn’t get all the songs right. Being a teenager, I just kept hoping that somehow I’d be able to get the songs recorded, even if they weren’t in the right order for her ‘story’ but I failed miserably. I left it till the last minute to confess. And, being a teenager, I didn’t let her know till the day before his birthday. I really landed her in it, I admit that. But it wasn’t that easy to record songs in those days and despite spending so much time listening to the radio with my tape player microphone all lined up ready to play record that my mum came in and threatened to confiscate it, they just didn’t play the right tracks in time. It might have been that week that taught me the evils of gambling. It was like some deranged musical bingo or Russian roulette. I knew that so much was riding on it. Rachel had asked me to do something, and I was about to let her down. I was worried she would never forgive me.

Predictably, on Tuesday 3rd of May when I had to come clean and tell her, she went ape-shit. She had to make a last minute change of plans and it nearly wrecked their relationship. She let me know it. And there wasn’t even the tiniest bit of me that felt good about potentially sabotaging their relationship, whatever Laura said. I wasn’t that mean. And I certainly wasn’t that smart. I was just that stupid.

What it came down to was that Billy was going to turn sixteen and Rachel had nothing to give him. Being a Tuesday afternoon, it was the one she had free periods and he skipped French. But she couldn’t be in two places at the one time. In an attempt to make amends, I offered to skip class and go and get him a record but she said she couldn’t trust me not to muck it up again, so instead she told me to meet Billy at the café and cover for her while she went to the record shop.

At the time, I have to confess, there was a part of me that thought things were turning out really well. I had no idea of splitting up Billy and Rachel, of course, but I couldn’t see past the excitement of spending an afternoon alone with Billy. I certainly didn’t see it from his point of view. Rachel told me not to ‘let on’ what was happening or I might spoil the surprise and, well, I guess I played it a bit wrong.

Billy turned up. He was surprised to see me – I’d got there before him, having told the teachers I had a dentist appointment – and looked around for Rachel.

‘She’s not coming,’ I told him. He looked annoyed rather than upset. I had to do whatever I could to stop him leaving, so when he said ‘Why not?’ I began to fabricate a story. Looking back it wasn’t a good story and it did probably leave him with the impression that she was about to dump him. All the ‘I can’t tell you’s’ and the ‘but don’t worry’s’ in the world didn’t dig me back out of the hole that I’d dug myself. I could tell he was devastated, even though he was acting (as ever) cool. I bought him a coke float. He drank it. ‘You sure she’s not coming?’ he said.

‘She’s getting you something for your birthday,’ I said. Then quickly followed up with ‘but don’t tell her I told you, she told me not to tell.’ I was gibbering by this time and I was probably acting really, really weird.

‘You were there when Laura dumped Scooby, right?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But…’

‘Is it your speciality?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Well, we’ve all got to be good at something,’ he said, ‘Are you like Sandy in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie?’

‘What?’ I asked. It was our set text but I didn’t get what he was getting at. All I could remember is that Sandy was the one who got naked with the art teacher. Something I would never have done even if we’d had a male art teacher. Which we didn’t.

‘Untrustworthy?’ he said.

‘Uh. No,’ I replied, probably putting just too much distance between the Uh and the no to be wholly convincing.

You have to remember that in those days the whole going out thing was never simple. It never happened that a boy went up and asked a girl out. Unless they got off together at a disco (and even then that didn’t mean ‘going out’ status was assured), they usually tested the water by getting a friend involved – my pal wants to go out with your pal- was the standard. It was like some updated version of a duel where the seconds sorted things out before the combatants come on the scene.

And dumping was equally fraught with confusion. There were a number of options. They depended on the personality of the individual. Option one, for the confident, or for those who didn’t want to lose face, was just to dump the other person directly, but that was rare. ‘You’re chucked’ was a last resort – and were words rarely uttered unless the chucker had already found a new partner and had to effect a break quickly because two-timing was totally beyond the accepted rules. More usual was the ‘devious means’ ploy. Laura’s actions with Scooby were just a variation on a well-worn theme. Couples would usually engage their friends to undertake the dirty deed and so when you were a couple, you viewed both their (and your) friends as potential harbingers of bad tidings at all times. Looking at it from Billy’s point of view, why else would Rachel have put me in as a substitute apart from to tell him it was over.

I didn’t think of all this at the time, of course. I was just trying to keep him there. So I bought him the said coke float. And went to the jukebox with my change. Once there, I didn’t know what to put on. ‘What do you want?’ I asked him as I put the money into the slot. He came up, stood beside me – I nearly fainted – but my joy was short-lived. In my confusion I’d pressed at random. And couldn’t have picked worse if I’d tried. The record fell and Julie Covington came on the jukebox. ‘It won’t be easy, you’ll think it’s strange… don’t cry for me Argentina…’

We sat looking at each other while it played. In the time it took to down the coke, the song finished. When it got to ‘There's nothing more I can think of to say to you’ he stood up, said ‘Tell her that from me,’ and left the café.

I didn’t know what to do. I was about to leave when Toni came up to take the glasses away and alerted me to something shiny on the ground.

‘This yours?’ he asked.

Of course it wasn’t. It was Billy’s identity bracelet. I drew my own conclusions. And picked it up.

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About the Author

​Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?

Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.

The Soundtrack of Our Lives is Annie's fourth McSerial written for McStorytellers.